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John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life

1998; Oxford University Press; Volume: 103; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2650121

1937-5239

Leonard L. Richard, John Quincy Adams, Paul C. Nagel,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life. By Paul C. Nagel. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Pp. xii, 432. $30.00, ISBN 0-679-40444-9.) John Quincy Adams seldom fares well in rankings of U.S. presidents frequently compiled by historians. The reason is not hard discover: during his administration (1825-29), Adams ran afoul of a rapidly changing political climate, machinations of politicians eager undercut him, and his own political clumsiness. If criteria for historical reputation were be expanded include entire public careers, however, Adams would surely rank close top. Adams's non-presidential accomplishments are legion: lawyer; U.S. senator; Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard; U.S. minister Netherlands, then Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain; poet and essayist; secretary of state and chief architect of Monroe Doctrine; erudite author of a pathbreaking report on weights and measures; antislavery Congressman; and counsel for Amistad mutineers before Supreme Court. Few individuals in entire of American public life have amassed such a remarkable record of public service. Adams is seldom included in American pantheon, in spite of his record, as a consequence not only of his failed administration but also of his irritable, often self-righteous manner and stubborn adherence a fading, eighteenth-century political order in raucously democratic, aggressively egalitarian world of nineteenth-century America. The biographies under review--alike in making case for Adams's historical importance (alike as well in their lamentable lack of footnotes and other scholarly apparatus)--are notably dissimilar in approach and significance. Lynn Parsons's John Quincy Adams successfully meets criteria of Madison House's American Profiles series of which it is a part: to add a human dimension study of history by offering relatively concise and swiftly-paced sketches of significant Americans. The series operates on reasonable premise that complex and often dry subjects ... can be enlivened and given meaning through a focus on ... individual stories (p. ix). The story Parsons tells, well informed and carried forward by an engaging narrative style, moves briskly and hits standard highpoints of Adams' s career. While it may effectively serve needs of elusive general reader, however, scholars will find little new concerning either Adams or his times in these pages. Parsons tells us Adams was deeply conservative and ardently nationalist. He was a man who, although affirming his own political independence (he wanted desperately be the man of my whole country), suffered rejection by American people in spite of decades of personal sacrifice and public service. Far more ambitious and thus more engaging is Paul Nagel's magisterial John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life. …